LOS ANGELES -- UC Santa Cruz graduate Rick Carter won the second Oscar of his career on Sunday night for production design on the film "Lincoln."

The Academy Award follows an Oscar he collected for "Avatar" in 2009. Carter, who earned a bachelor's degree in art in 1974, said his student days at UCSC were spent painting -- something he still pursues between film productions for Steven Spielberg and others.

"I was called on by Steven to begin work on 'Lincoln' all the way back in 2001, even before 9/11," Carter said in a backstage interview on Oscars.org. Carter said he wanted to honor Abraham Lincoln's legacy.

"At first, it was a broad canvas and it was narrowed over time to be reflective of the last three months of Lincoln's life."

Carter shared the award with set decorator Jim Erickson, whom he mentioned in his acceptance speech.

Carter has returned to UCSC several times since he graduated, recently on a film panel at the university's "Bridging the Gap" event in the Arts Division in June 2012. He talked about his early days with Spielberg.

"The production designer for 'Goonies' was out of town, so I took Spielberg on a tour of the sets. I also gave a narrative of the design ideas as I gave the tour. Spielberg responded to the sets and to my narrative. And that led to the beginning of our relationship."

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In 1984, Carter was assigned to join Spielberg on the "Goonies" second unit.

"Then when he started working on 'Amazing Stories' for TV he thought of me for that project. And for the next two years I worked on the series, which led to a meeting with Robert Zemeckis."

Carter "bounced back and forth" between Zemeckis and Spielberg for the next 25 years, working on films such as "Back to the Future," "Jurassic Park," "Forrest Gump" and "War of the Worlds."

Carter's production ideas for "Lincoln" started small.

"For 'Lincoln' we had two photos and one sketch of what his living room and private rooms looked like. We followed those meticulously," he recalls. "As far as the feel of the film, I was looking for a sense of place that felt haunted as he, Lincoln, was haunted by the war, and also as we are haunted by our image of him now. The story we envisioned was a personal portrait," Carter said.

"That's what comes across in the movie, not a grand sweeping overview. That's closer to the work I do as a portrait painter. The portrait is a metaphor of far-flung places taken together that then go deep inside."

Carter said trips to places like Bangkok and Bali helped feed his creativity around the time he attended UCSC.

"I dropped out of (UC) Berkeley and went on the hippie circuit traveling in 1970," he said. "When I came back, I went to UCSC and studied painting. I even dropped out of UCSC for four months to go back to Asia."

Working on "Amazing Stories," Carter added, "took me through many kinds of imagery, and that suited my former hippie days background, my time at UCSC, and my traveling around the world."